The Stone of Madness Review – 18th century the stealth 'em up with a diabolical psychological turn

Stop me if you have heard this before. There is a monastery located on the top of the mountains of Europe. The spooky secrets lurk within their fortified walls: inhabitants affected by strange diseases; The bodies fell from the towers, the chickens peak the pieces of brain splashed. More scary of all? The pure hypocrisy of those who profess love for God and their human partners, but never lose the opportunity to subjugate, with words, cane or a much more acute object, to the most vulnerable than themselves.

The stone of madness can be established in the 18th century, about 350 full years of the magistral monastic mystery of Umberto Eco, the name of the rose, however, the game is clearly in debt to the literary phenomenon. Actually, the game is approaching the novel through an unusual source, an adaptation of 1987 adventure video games called the Crime Abbey, “one of the most important games made in Spain,” said Stone of Madness director , Maikel Ortega.

What we have is not so much a direct adaptation as an interpretation eliminated twice that it tries to translate the spirit and structure of the echo book in the form of video game. Naturally, there is a mystery to solve, one that involves disastrous clergy. But you are not playing as a detective (or equivalent) in parachute in these sacred rooms, but as a cast of prisoners imprisoned within them. That is the other great starting point of the Book of Eco: this monastery, in dazzling and enlightened style, bends as an asylum that, of course, is just another word for a prison in this historical environment. Here come the shakes of agony, guilt and heresy!

At first glance, the stone of madness is a game for the Spanish study, The Game Kitchen. His previous games, the 2019 blasphemus and his sequel of 2023, were robust and immaculate tribute works to 16 -bit action platforms, elevated by genuinely depraved Catholic art. The stone of madness is an isometric stealthy adventure with a tablespoon of immersive sim (and only a little less blood). See the kitchen game frowning a more distinctive mechanical path, and mainly running on it.

This isometric monastery is large and ornately detailed, protected by the club guards and weapons of clubs and weapons of a militia. Touching as a band of valuable escaped, including the devoted priest Alfredo and the old woman of the witch Agnes, you are free to move through some areas with relative freedom (such as the dusty patio you feel next to a garden), while others are strictly outside the limits (such as the luxurious housing of more distinguished patients). Its objective is to avoid awakening suspicions while it is probably standing in the vision cone of the eyes of a guard. Do not do it and you must scare the nearest hiding place, Alfredo's white nightgown floats while running.

If you know the commands or raised games, all this will sound very familiar. The friction comes in the shape of the clock: as time progresses, the levels change (you do not want to get stuck in the refectory while the monks have lunch, for example). Choose staying at night and areas will be further restricted; You should also consider both the patrol guards and the spirits that pursue the monastery. Then, having become a wet cell for the night, more opportunities arise: trade in the black market; heal party members; Console others to calm the darkest thoughts of the group.

That is another key difference between the stone of madness and its stealthy stealth: each of its characters has a sanity meter that will want to keep quiet, so that they do not despair spiral.

Pity the poor Eduardo, an imposing man with heartbreaking, hunched members and a heart of gold. It provides the group's muscle, capable of putting huge wooden boards to make catwalks to unattainable areas and throwing debris to distract the guards. He is also afraid of darkness, it is not exactly an ideal feature in this monastery with little light. At the beginning of the game, you just control Alfredo and this giant gentle. Such was my incompetence, I quickly fell into the beautiful sanity of Eduardo (mainly by leaving him breathlessly).

With each piece of diminished sanity, Eduardo developed a new disease: claustrophobia, which means that he could not hide in closed spaces; Cowardice, which means that I could not commit illegal acts in prohibited areas. Quickly, my loyal mammoth became a peel of his former self, so weakened as to become useless. So I left it in the cell, just putting it at night to elaborate objects, or worst of all, participate in retrospective manual work in an attempt to convince the prison that neither he nor his co-conspiramers raised a threat. He felt like a sad and very likely disappearance for a man who had already gone through a lot.

I transmit Eduardo's destiny because he demonstrates how the game systems, even in times of irrefutable failure, are those that produce narrative and mechanically coherent results. Another instance involves Leonarda, a fighter hero capable of killing in cold blood. Except after killing an involuntary enemy, he is full of shame, cutting his arm in a disturbingly animated autolesions attack, so he escapes from a heart of his set of lives. The effect is temporary, but this is an ingenious act of video game balance, inductor of a grimace and elegant to equal extent.

Unfortunately, if only all aspects of the game were so effective. There is some tremia in the controls, especially when they go to the characters about a group and the route search cables take members to enemy lines. Another Niggle: having to manually move to each character to a trap door (the fast travel system) one at the same time instead of a single unit.

The biggest problem is the mystery that, to say without surroundings, is not especially absorbent, and the real script, which does not jump exactly from the screen as the brilliant prose of Eco jumps from the page. This is a slower and easier game driven by the plot than the blasphemous games, which mostly avoided a specific plot for arcane motivations and an atmosphere full of fear. The indistinct and general narrative is lost in the objectives that occur on the ambitious day and night structure of the game. More than once, I forgot why I was completing a particular task, such as the SET piece that involves talking about a monk of a violent paranoid episode. The completion of such objectives generally does not lead to narrative epiphanies, which shed the mystery under a new light, but to promote their occupied work, such as looking for a beautiful emblem in the great crack that carves in one of the immaculate sandstone walls of the monastery. The plot progresses, but not in an especially tempting and full of tension.

And yet, if the mystery of the stone of madness has no greatness, then the game summons a great quality of mysterious fiction. While jumping on the cloisters and slides to the guards, when your team combines without problems and the enemy progresses, the game is an electric combination of coincidence, luck, skill and opportunity. He speaks to a subtle change but entertaining in the perspective between the stone of madness and the name of Rose: the player not only solves a riddle, but also perpetuates one. What fun, the Franciscan monk William de Baskerville would have decoded this network of tangled actions!

Even so, despite all the delay and the cheerful slip of the game, the terrible theme does not shy away, in terms of itself, with the often monstrous legacy of the real world of the Church. The most affected story is what occurs through the bodies and minds of its uniformly endearing characters. As they are beaten and mutilated by fearsome brutal monks and henchmen, a slow accumulation of difficulties takes place. It is not the stealthy action in a pleasant way, nor the little cooked mystery, or even the luxurious monastery that persists in the mind, but its human suffering. In the foreground this emotion is a sufficient reason to tell that story again.

The Tripwire Interactive editor provided a copy of the madness stone for review.